This chapter explores the concept of how categories like food and cultural artifacts evolve over time through iteration and combining of ideas. It also discusses the speaker's fascination with the evolution of language, including punctuation, and shares insights from an interview with a punctuation scholar.
On this episode we learn about the history of the exclamation point, the question mark, and the semicolon (among many other aspects of language) with Florence Hazrat, a scholar of punctuation, who, to my great surprise, informed me that while a lot of language is the result of a slow evolution, a gradual ever-changing process, punctuation in the English language is often an exception to this – for instance, a single person invented the semicolon; they woke up and the semicolon didn’t exist, and then went to bed that night, and it did!
Florence Hazrat's Website
An Admirable Point
How Minds Change
David McRaney’s Twitter
YANSS Twitter
Show Notes
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